Cocaine Nation by Tom Feiling How the White Trade Took Over the World

An in-depth, narrative study of the cocaine industry—from the fields of Colombia to the streets of New York—as it has never been told before.

Cocaine is big business and getting bigger. Governments spend millions on a losing war against it, yet it's still the drug of choice in the West. How did the cocaine economy become so massive? Who keeps it running behind the scenes?

In Cocaine Nation, Tom Feiling travels the trade routes from Colombia via Miami, Kingston and Tijuana to London and New york. he meets Medellin hitmen, U.S. kingpins, Brazilian traffickers, and talks to soldiers and narcotics officers who fight the gangs and cartels. He traces cocaine's progress from legal 'pick-me-up' to luxury product to global commodity, looks at legalization programs in countries such as Switzerland, and shows how America's anti-drugs crusade is actually increasing demand. Cutting through the myths about the white trade, this is the story of cocaine as it's never been told before.

Tom Feiling is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. He spent a year working in South America where he made Resistencia: Hip-Hop in Colombia , which won numerous awards at film festivals around the world. He now lives in London where he is a director for lsquo;Justice for Colombia,rsquo; which defends human rights in Colombia. Cocaine Nation is his first book.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Cocaine Nation

Kirkus Reviews

The emergence and attractiveness of smoking crack cocaine is attributed to the drug’s triple threat of availability, affordability and “the most intense sense of being alive the user will ever enjoy.” Feiling scrutinizes drug policies, anti-drug initiatives, stringent sanctions and prohibition ta...

The New York Times

With a new regime in Washington, led by a president who admits to having used cocaine in his youth and a drug czar who rejects martial metaphors, this is a good time to look back on America’s first “war without end” and its pre-eminent target, as the documentary filmmaker Tom Feiling does in “Coc...

Publishers Weekly

Driving a car loaded with cocaine from El Paso to Chicago can earn the driver $10,000.â Crack cocaine, a cheaper form of the drug, became a booming market in the 1980s, even spreading to rural America.

AV Club

Feiling is scathing about the ineffectiveness of moral crusades—Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign did not, as he witheringly quotes her, “keep the drugs out.” Judging from the information Feiling so impressively gathers and arrays here, it’s hard to imagine that anything could.